What Is Innovative Resume

Innovative Resume is a brand new service¹ by Grand Consulting, Rendered Text and us — Superawesome. Basically it is an online resume builder that enables you to have a stunning looking resume². With Innovative Resume you don’t even have to know what specific information a resume should contain, you don’t need to know anything about design, or any other technology used on the Web for that matter. All you need is a Web browser.

Once you sign up you will:

1. get three resume slots — basically ability to create three resumes, or three versions of a resume targeted to different employers/jobs
2. get access to the resume builder — the heart of the service that lets you easily create, edit and update your resumes
3. get many different resume themes to choose from — let them know who you are with style
4. export your resumes to downloadable PDF and RTF documents
5. keep an eye on basic statistics of your resumes.

In addition to all these features you can attach any type of file to your resume essentially to act as supplemental material for your resume page, this can be a recommendation, a letter of reference or a scanned in certificate or a mix of those, the sky is the limit.

Building Your Resume

The most important part of the service is the builder, we sweat over it over and over again until we got what we think will work for our users. It definitely has room for improvement (hey, what doesn’t?) and they will come, but we think the current state it’s in does well what it’s supposed to do.

Dashboard

Once you create an account you will be logged in and taken to your dashboard where you can start creating your resumes or manage your account and information.

Resume Builder

All resumes are split into logical sections that are represented through tabs in the builder. What’s cool about this is that it enables you to fill out your resume starting with whichever section you feel most comfortable with. Don’t feel like putting together a detailed objective — no worries, leave it for later, start with career experience instead. In case you get confused by some of the fields, simply glance over at the text accompanying each field, it will give you an idea which information is expected.

Markers & Indicators

As you go in and fill it out (you can hit “save” at any point) the builder will mark the spots you have left out but are required³. The markers⁴ will appear on the tabs, but it will also highlight the fields themselves to give you a better idea of what you need to fill in with information. As you go in and fill more fields, the markers and highlights will disappear.

The important thing is — your resume can not go public until you have filled out all of the required information, until then it remains in the “draft” mode only viewable by it’s owner (the builder will clearly indicate this). This is so you can preview the themes and see which one suits your resume best, and of course to prevent publishing of incomplete or malformed resumes.

Now that you have completed your resume, it will appear on your dashboard, along with some additional options and information.

Once created each resume gets a publicly accessible URL, but it’s randomly generated and not very pretty, so we encourage users to set their resume’s URLs to something more meaningful (and search engine friendly), like http://innovativeresume.com/r/dragan-babic and the system lets you do that very easily.

Also we’re aware that there are certain situations when you don’t want your resume to be publicly available and indexed by search engines. In that case you may choose not to set the custom URL (security by obscurity, heh?), and additionally password protect your resume, so you can be sure no one will get a peek at your personal information or even know you’re looking for a new job unless you want them to.

Additionally to these options, the system keeps track of certain statistics on the activity on your resumes, so you can quickly glance at how many views there have been, PDF and RTF downloads and direct printouts. Oh, did we mention you can export your resume to PDF and RTF? No worries, we’ll get to that shortly!

Resume Themes

A nice looking, well formed resume is what this is all about, and we sure as hell can make it look good and make it work for you in more than one way.

All accounts are able to choose from (currently) 12 resume themes — designs diverse enough that should cover most of what anyone could expect from a resume to look like.

OK, so now you have a resume that’s full of useful information about you, your potential employers are interested in, and it looks good. There’s more.

All resumes created by and hosted by InnovativeResume.com are machine friendly. They are formatted by special HTML code that’s “understandable” by computers. These codes are known throughout the Web developer community as Microformats. Just to give you an idea of how important this is, let’s just say that Google now supports them in it’s searching algorithms.

Your Resume Is Not Used By You

Of course you yourself won’t be using your resume much. It is crucially important that your main target audience — your prospect employers — can make use of your resume. That’s why Innovative Resumes are easily shared:

• your visitors can export your resume to most popular formats, namely PDF and RTF so that they can be easily emailed or printed
• resumes are easily printable directly from the browser
• you and your visitors can email your resume to other people directly from the site.

All resumes share a default “print theme” that’s used by PDF and print options, so you are certain it will look good even when it’s not viewed on the site from the browser.

Get Your Free Resume!

As a special launch promotion we will give away activation codes for one year subscriptions to the first 25 people that tweet anything related to Innovative Resume, and hashtag it with #innovativeresume.

Example tweet:

Create and host your resume with Innovative Resume (RT for free 1yr account!) #innovativeresume

or:

I just tried #innovativeresume, give it a go if you need a cool looking resume! http://innovativeresume.com/

Basically tweet anything you want and include the “#innovativeresume” hashtag and that’s all there is to it! We will be announcing the 25 lucky ones to get a brand new resume on the site and of course via Twitter, so consider following @inresume, good luck.

¹ Currently it is aimed directly at the US market, but we’ll soon be supporting accounts from all over the world. This limitation is enforced only by a lack of a country selector, you’re free to try out the service in free trial mode no matter where you live.

² Somewhere more commonly referred to as a CV or curriculum vitae

³ E.g. it is mandatory for any resume to have a title

⁴ You may be familiar with these if you have used Apple products such as Mail, they are usually referred to as “badges”.